Güneş joined the Department of Digital Humanities in 2019 as ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and is currently Lecturer in Digital Infrastructures and Sustainability. She earned her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, where her research focused on (open) data-driven practices, initiatives, and discourses in the context of smart city planning in London. Her current research sits at the intersection of digital technologies, environmental justice, urban ecology and app studies. Specifically, she examines the epistemological and infrastructural implications of digital apps, data, and machine learning technologies in the context of urban ecology.

Previously, Güneş worked at a civil society organisation in Istanbul, conducting policy research on ICTs, digital innovation, e-government and social media. She later led projects on digital surveillance and censorship in Turkey from rights-based perspective, including the preparation of country reports for the Association for Progressive Communications. In addition, she contributed to publications such as Computer Weekly, where she wrote on the state of data technologies in Turkey, and Open Democracy, where she discussed social media, activism and freedom of expression.

Research interests

My current research interests are:

• Critical Data Studies
• Environmental Justice
• Digital Ecology
• Critical App Studies
• Datafication of Urban infrastructure
• (Electronic) Waste

I welcome PhD inquiries in these areas, especially those that incorporate feminist and/or decolonial perspectives.

Teaching

Güneş has taught a wide range of subjects, including technology and development, urban media and mediated urban, digital cultures, the digital economy, critical data studies, and theoretical approaches in media studies.

Selected publications

• Vrikki, P., & Tavmen, G. (2025). Rewiring Digital Humanities through an Ethics of Ecological Care. Digital Humanities Quarterly, Vol:19 No:3
• Tavmen, G. (2024). “Open data means business”: Infrastructural and economic implications of opening up data in smart London. Digital Geography and Society.
• Wang, Y. and Tavmen, G. (2024) ‘New outlets of digital feminist activism in China: the #SeeFemaleWorkers campaign’, Feminist Media Studies, pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2024.2334782.
• Tavmen, G. (2023) Cybernetic Urbanism: Tracing the Development of the Responsibilized Subject and Self-Organizing Communities in Smart Cities, in Mackinnon D, Fast V, Burns R (eds), Digital (In)justice in the Smart City, University of Toronto Press.
• Tavmen, G. (2020) Data/Infrastructure in the Smart City: Understanding the Infrastructural Power of Citymapper App through Technicity of Data, Big Data & Society.